“unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable”: Attending to Henry James’s Music

Henry James, so legend has it, was no musician, no music aficionado—a “strictly nonmusical auditor” in his own words (PS 174). Certainly, James’s letters back to America from Paris in the 1870s suggest large indifference to the many musical soirées to which he was “subjected” in the French capital (Brooks 33): in a letter to his father, he described a night of “interminable fiddling” and other “musical parties” at Pauline Viardot’s as “rigidly musical” and, as such, “rigidly boresome” (HJL 2.37). A few months later, a performance of piano “selections from Wagner’s Bayreuth operas” left him “bored” while “the rest were in ecstasy” (HJL 2.73). He was no musical naïf—his responses, even when they were bored, often reveal a man saturated with an awareness of the classical music scene and the popular critical discourse associated with it. Yet, despite a career-long interest in and engagement with opera (well discussed by the likes of Michael Halliwell, J. Peter Dyson, and Jeremy Tambling), James seems to have kept his distance from musical appreciation.¹ With no formal training in any instrument or theory, James frequently experienced music as a foreign language. His response, in 1895, to composer George Henschel’s suggestion that he write a libretto to be set to music is typical: “I am,” he declared, “unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable” (LHJ 1.230).

Visual tropes—such as perception, perspective, spectatorship, and display—tend to dominate the critical lexicon in Henry James studies, and scholars have paid ample attention to James’s representation of the visual arts and of painters and to his engagement with visual forms in his fiction.² Such attention is justifiable given James’s considerable body of art criticism and his explicit evocation of the “sister art” in his critical manifesto, “The Art of Fiction”: “[T]he analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete” (LC 1.46). But this visual predilection risks underplaying James’s consistent interest in aural performance as an artistic field tenuously analogous to his own novelistic experiments. Accounts of James’s painterly disposition tend to reinforce our visual understanding of narrative (famously moving, in James’s own vocabulary, between “picture” and “scene”), an understanding that places us, the audience, at a distance not unlike that of numerous tendentiously removed spectators (like Ralph Touchett, the narrator of The Sacred Fount, or Lewis Lambert Strether) that populate his fiction. By contrast, reading Henry James’s music—his representation of musicians, musical performance, and musical rhetoric in his fiction—can productively redirect us to Jamesian narrative’s modeling of the reading process as an uncertain shuffling between attentiveness and inattentiveness, absorption and indifference, charmed compulsion and bewilderment.³

Music, as Stephen Benson notes, “is at once the most direct and esoteric of the arts” (1)—accordingly, music plays out, in James’s fiction, as background noise, as a social medium, and as a dynamic and mysterious aesthetic. Philip Horne has persuasively argued for a rereading of James “among the poets,” an appreciation of his “receptiv[ity] to the language of poetry” (“Among the Poets” 72) and of the ways in which “his prose can be felt as ‘poetic’” (“Among the Poets” 80). I do not propose, here, to offer a similar rereading of James as, in fact, deeply musical. Rather, I want to suggest that it was James’s persistent sense of a certain lack of musicality that gives the surprisingly frequent representation and rhetoric of music in his works its peculiar charge—music is, for James, something both powerfully heard and not heard in the same sitting. One might imagine James taking up, in his works that address music, something like the ironic position of the narrator of his 1892 story “Collaboration,” a tale about an operatic collaboration like that proposed by Henschel to James between the German composer Herman Heidenmauer and the French poet Félix Vendemer. “Music makes its home,” the narrator declares, in his salon; “though I confess,” he quickly adds, “I...